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Map of Some Continent

So here is the map I am currently working on and I am having more than a few misgivings with the style (Ascenion's style). I'm trying to make the forests look like forests, but I do not know how. I don't really understand how to use textures and what not or even where to get them/how to make them.

A question I'd like to pose to Ascension himself (should he glance at this post) is about the cities in your Jade Coast map: how'd you manage to get them to look like overheads of cities?

I read everything...don't always understand some of them (game-play stuff and programs that I don't have) and I don't say anything if I don't have anything to add but I do read every post.

I think it looks excellent and very striking as well with the way you did the coastal shallows. The thumbnail looks so so, always does, but at full size I think it's great.

The cities on that map are modified brushes of the Photoshop default 1 pixel hard round. I set the scatter way up around 800 (and count around and when you make a click it puts down a bunch of dots. Couple of clicks and you have a bunch of dots then I add some layer styles (those are posted in the Jasmine Coast thread somewhere) and that's all. The forts are custom brushes that I made and those are in the Mapping Elements section.

Forests on this scale are generally left as dark green areas and not "foresty" textured. I've never experimented with doing forests, really, on this scale.

If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)

I wanted the trees to be of a subtle element rather than an in your face one. Cities and such I'm going to try and replicate Ascension's Jade Coast style and we'll see what other map elements I'll throw in- possibly hills.